King Cooling

With business really picking up across Waikato, things are heating up for King Cooling. Fortunately, their dedicated Business Channel Manager Sandie Rota knows the rural area well, and that’s helping her come up with clever ways to help them stay on top of things.

At home, if your refrigerator breaks down it’s an inconvenience. But if you operate a dairy farm, it’s your livelihood. So Te Awamutu based refrigeration specialists King Cooling use mobile technology to find faults faster and fix them sooner, ensuring their customers, quite literally, don’t lose their cool.

Owners Brad and Jaime Johanson, who started King Cooling in 2008 admit that in the early days, they were often frustrated with their previous mobile provider. “I was doing a lot of work in King Country back then, and their reception was terrible.” Brad recalls. It was getting so bad it was having a big impact on the business. Fortunately, around four years ago Jaime spotted a rep from their local Spark Business Hub while visiting a neighbouring business and the rest is history. “That’s when we made the switch, and we’ve had no problems since.”

Now, thanks to Spark’s coverage, plus mobile devices from the local Business Hub, he always knows where things are at with his clients, without having to put in the miles. “We’ve got refrigeration equipment that has its own static IP, which I can dial into to have a look at what's going on” Brad explains. “I can change settings, fault find, and check what's wrong with the system anywhere via my mobile.”

As a result, Brad says he’s picking up customers all over the place. “We do work for a pet food factory in Te Aroha, a honey factory in Taupo, we even go across to Kawhia and Taharoa on the West Coast.” And to help him manage the increased workload, he is increasingly reliant on Business Channel Manager Sandie Rota. She knows the Waikato region well and works with a number of other rural customers too, which helps her better understand the nature of King Cooling’s business. She sees that local knowledge as key to delivering great service. “It’s unique, working in a rural area,” she explains. “I think we get to know people better than in the big cities. The work they do, the geography and distances they’re dealing with, what their families are up to. We do become their trusted advisors.”

This intimate understanding helped Sandie spot a great way for King Cooling to improve their efficiency. Ironically, while technology is enabling them to handle more jobs than ever before, Brad admits keeping track of them all has become taxing. “Sometimes in a day I'll get 30 calls! And if I'm at a client's site and I'm working on their machine and I'm taking 30 calls, the client is looking at me like, 'Aren’t you here to fix my machine?'” Picking up on Brad’s dilemma during one of their conversations, Sandie came up with an innovative solution, NextMinute. It’s a job management app for scheduling, quoting, invoicing and managing customer information anywhere at any time. “If that's something Brad decides to do it’s going to better enable his business, and make him even more mobile” says Sandie. “He'll be able to leave his team to just get on and take care of business, and know it's in good hands.”

In fact, these days Sandie’s so familiar with their needs, she’s always having ideas for their business. “I’m constantly looking at what products we have and what improvements we can offer,” she explains. “Jaime flicks me an email or a text and I just get back to her and we work through solutions.”

Brad’s also finding the close relationship really useful. “The good thing about Sandie is we can just ring her and ask if we can adjust this and tweak that and she takes care of it”. And it’s definitely helping him keep things under control as business heats up for King Cooling. “Sandie’s always thinking ‘what’s next’ and is brilliant at making things happen,” Johanson concludes. “Technology is definitely the way forward for us and I really trust Sandie to help with that.”